Today I’d like to share how we implement our end-of-the-year advance.
Some people call our end-of-the-year advance an off-site or a retreat. Essentially, it’s a meeting we hold at the end of the year where we leave the comfortable surroundings of our office building to go off-site, just to change things up. At this meeting, we do a recap of the past year and a forecast for the next year, combined with trainings and other activities. To plan your end-of-the-year advance, here are a few key things to keep in mind:
1. Pick a date and time. Try not to plan it too close to the end of the year; the idea is to have enough time to recap what’s already happened and also give yourself enough time to finish the year strong and make projections for the next year.
2. Make it valuable. To make this meeting valuable to those who attend, you should incorporate education, training, and team culture. Our team invites a guest speaker to create a new kind of energy in the group. For our last one, we had three local business owners attend to help us do some exercises, and it worked out tremendously.
3. Get feedback. It’s critical to understand how everything was received by our team. That’s why we ask for immediate and long-term feedback. The immediate feedback tells us how everyone felt about the guest speakers and the various activities we did; the long-term feedback comes about a week later and helps us to evaluate and improve upon the overall value of the experience.
If you’d like to discuss this idea in more detail, please reach out to us. We’d love to share our thoughts and provide a template to help you implement end-of-the-year advances.
